Cooper defends Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ line but says she does not know if he was aware of Enoch Powell echo – UK politics live

The unemployment rate in the UK has risen to its highest level in almost four years, according to official figures, as the jobs market continues to slow. Heather Stewart has the story.

Chris Weston, chief executive at Thames Water, has defended his decision to accept a £195,000 bonus just three months into the job last year.

Giving evidence to the Commons environment committee, where he was asked if it was wise to accept such a big bonus so soon after her started, Weston replied:

I think in the first three months I did make a difference.

I started to put in place the new organisational structure, I started to give people confidence and reassurance about how proud they could be of the job they did and what we were setting out to do. And that helped stabilise the company and I think that was important.

Weston also said the company had “lost direction a bit” when he took over.

I was the fifth chief executive in five years … that creates a confusion for people in the company. I think it required clearer direction, which I have given … Sixteen months in I’m quite pleased with the progress we’re making.

It is a big ship to turn around. It is very difficult.

Helena Horton

Helena Horton is a Guardian environment reporter.

US agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins finished a press conference in London where she said she would like to see the UK and the US more aligned on food standards regulation.

She also seemed to soften her stance on getting the UK to accept chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-treated beef from last week when she said US agriculture was being treated “very unfairly” by countries such as the UK and that she wanted the UK to accept “all meat” from the US.

Rollins told reporters the market is beginning to move away from hormone-treated beef, and that chlorine-washed chicken has almost entirely been removed from the US supply chain.

Asked about US beef producers phasing out hormones she said:

Our agriculture producers, our cattle producers etc, obviously are constantly watching what the markets look like, and if the markets are calling for a specific type, or they have more opportunity somewhere, then I think that we potentially do see some movement in the market.

Rollins added that she wanted the US, UK and other countries to have more regulatory alignment and similar standards for agriculture. She said:

One thing … I’ve taken from a lot of the discussions yesterday [when she met Steve Reed, the enviroment secretary] and today is that the more our two countries, and those who are aligned with our values, are regulatory aligned, meaning that we don’t have all these different systems and structures – I think that that is going to go a tremendously long way to supporting the agriculture industry.

Rollins also seemed to have softened her stance on asking the UK to accept chlorine chicken. She said:

Only about 5% of our chicken in America is actually treated that way, with the chlorine. So we have moved, over the last decade, completely away from the ‘chlorine chicken’. So that’s I think that’s a really important to dispel, and I’m very grateful to do that.

She also said that, although pork and poultry weren’t included in last week’s US-UK trade deal, they are at the top of the list for further discussions.

In an interview on Newsnight last night Arlene Foster, the former DUP leader, said she thought that someone in Downing Street would have known that “island of strangers” was a clear echo of what Enoch Powell said in his Rivers of Blood speech. Asked if Keir Starmer would have been aware of the similarities in the language, she replied:

Somebody did Downing Street, I’m convinced of it,

“Island of strangers” is a very particular form of words, it’s almost a term of art. So where did it come from? And who was the person that said this should go into the speech?

But Starmer’s allies are saying it was genuine mistake, and not an intentional echo of what Powell said. “It was an accident, and not designed to cause a row,” according to a source close to No 10 familiar with what happened. The source accepts that someone should have realised that the “island of strangers” phrase had Powellite connotations. But the fact that this was not picked up is attributed to an error, and not an attempt to reference the Rivers of Blood speech.

This is from Steve Richards, the veteran political commentator, on social media the Starmer/Powell language row.

Keir Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ comment is part of a pattern.. his willingness to read out whatever is written for him by clunky advisers ..in this case trying too hard to make him sound like Farage..As a result inauthenticity is a wider problem for him. There are many arguments to be made for border security. He made some of them well…All lost by a single stupid phrase that some right wing populists would think twice before using…and anyway predictably leads to the Mail and co running their usual hostile front pages.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, was also doing an interview round this morning. Asked about Keir Starmer’s warning in his speech yesterday that Britain was at risk of becoming an “island of strangers” because of the impact of mass immigration, Jenrick claimed Britain was already like this. He told Times Radio:

I think it’s true. In fact, I think in some places we already are. Aggressive levels of mass migration have made us more divided.

If you look at communities in our country, for example central Bradford, 50% of people were born outside of the United Kingdom; in central Luton, 46% of residents arrived in the past decade.

There are places like Dagenham where the white British population has fallen by almost 60% in the last 25 years.

People in many parts of our country are experiencing profound change as a result of the levels of migration that we’ve seen, and we’ve got to bring that back to the historic levels that we enjoyed as a country which enabled us to be a well-integrated and united country, rather than the one that we’re seeing today.

(A pedant might point out that, even though Enoch Powell and Keir Starmer were making a rhetorical point when they talked about “strangers”, technically we are an island of strangers anway. There are almost 70 million of us here, and most of us only personally know hundreds, or at best a few thousands, of our fellow citizens.)

Good morning. Yesterday Keir Starmer unveiled the government’s immigration white paper, a significant policy intervention on a topic that is near the top of the public’s list of concerns. Yet today the debate is dominated not by the actual policies – even though they could cause big problems in some sectors of the economy, as we explain here – but by the language Starmer used to defend them.

To recap, in one section of his speech yesterday Starmer said:

Nations depend on rules – fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not, but either way, they give shape to our values. They guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to one another. Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.

This generated huge controversy not just because of the argument (some people don’t accept the claim that high levels of immigration undermine social cohesion), but because the argument and the language echo what Enoch Powell said in his infamous Rivers of Blood speech in 1968. Powell said:

While, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted.

Starmer was clearly echoing Powell. But what is not clear is whether, for Starmer and/or the person who write the speech, this was intentional, unconscious (people can remember phrases without recalling where they came from), or complete coincidence (politicians more than 50 years apart, making a similar argument, by deploying the same, not-particularly-unusual word).

Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech was denounced as racist as soon as he delivered it (although not so much for his comments about native Britons finding mass migration unsettling, where many people would agree he had a point, but for his suggestion that it would culminate in violence, oppression and social collapse, where he has turned out to be hopelessly wrong) and it is still widely viewed as abhorrent. Yesterday Starmer was condemned by leftwingers for saying something that sounded Powellite.

But ministers have defended him. Asked about this on Newsnight last night, Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, said comparing the Starmer speech to Powell’s was “wrong”. She went on:

Labour and Labour governments have always listened to people in terms of their concerns about their security and the opportunities that they want to have for themselves and their children. And when we see something that we understand that people believe is unfair, then we are going to take action on that. That’s what the British people expect us to do, that’s what Labour governments do.

This morning Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, was giving interviews, and on the Today programme she said she agreed with Smith. She went on:

I don’t think it’s right to make those comparisons [between Starmer’s speech and Powell’s]. It’s completely different. And the prime minister said yesterday, I think almost in the same breath, talked about the diverse country that we are and that being part of our strength.

Cooper said that, when Starmer talked about the rise of Britain being “an island of strangers”, he was referring to “the importance of recognising the impact … [of] this big increase in net migration, and also that we’ve got to have the support for integration, support for English language speaking, a lot of the measures that are set out as part of that white paper”.

Asked if Starmer or his speech writers knew that the “island of strangers” phrase echoed Powell, Cooper said she did not know.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

10am: Thames Water bosses give evidence to the Commons environment committee about reforming the water sector.

11.30am: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: MPs begin a debate on an assisted dying bill.

3.15pm: Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, gives evidence to the Commons business committee about industrial strategy.

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